There are many causes of IT project cost overruns and delay. One cause is the pretentious attitude of developers. They look down on tools and programming languages that are too easy or too simple or too popular with amateur developers. The ‘cool’ developers tend to follow the herd and use tools and languages that lesser minds find difficult. They feel that it would look good on their resumes.

At any time, the tools getting all the love in the forums, are difficult to learn, add complexity to the whole development process, and need specialists hosting. They have their use but not for the majority of use cases.

Not so cool reason
But maybe there are other reasons. As someone on Reddit said: “but on the other hand my boss loves to hear that I am using #LATESTCOOLTHING and since I don’t work for myself half of my job is making my boss think I am cool.” Most of these managers/bosses follow the herd and are incapable of making an informed decision.

Building websites
According to w3techs.com, PHP is used by 81.7% of all websites.
PHP is a language for the quick development of dynamic Websites but can be as safe and secure as other languages. PHP is old technology but simple and easy to learn and easy to deploy.
However, ‘cool’ programmers don’t do easy stuff. Real programmers pull up their noses at the working PHP solutions of other by calling them the work of ‘dumb and dumber’.
Meanwhile the ‘cool’ project costs gets bigger and bigger. Project time to completion gets pushed back further and further.

Truly ‘cool’ but unpretentious
As a programmer you should stay abreast of new developments. Again from Reddit: “we should only use new approaches when they suit the problems that we’re solving. Choosing “new” for it’s own sake is just fashion.”

Try your best to not follow the herd and try to understand the new stuff. Always use the best tools for the job and not jump on the bandwagon with the flavour of the month.
If the strengths of PHP is called for, use it.

Stay strong.

One response to “Pretentious IT people”

Love the post. Made me think back to the maybe now not so good ol days.

If most apps were in php, then the brand of device or browser would not matter and productivity would increase. There are so many other benefits of using tried and tested ways, but unless we are not pushing the boundaries we think we are missing something.

We seem to get things done quickly using methods that are not up to standard and then corporates spend vast resources to make it happen and by the the time it is done, we have reinvented our method or requirement.